Belief of the Universe (Uchū no shinkyō), variant I

Uchū no shinkyō (Belief of the Universe) is one of Uehara Konen's most enigmatic compositions, and the Library of Congress preserves two distinct impressions of the design. This first variant (LC 2008660503) presents a vast night sky filling the upper two-thirds of the sheet, with a single low landscape band of dark earth and silhouetted trees occupying the lower margin. The composition is structured by a great milky-white spiral or galaxy form at the center of the sky, suggesting the structure of the Milky Way as understood in early twentieth-century Japanese astronomical illustration. The palette is reduced to a deep ultramarine for the sky, a paler aniline blue for the spiral, and a charcoal black for the lower landscape band, with a few precise keyblock strokes establishing the contours of the distant hills. The title, which translates literally as 'belief of the universe' or 'faith of the cosmos,' suggests a meditative or quasi-religious response to the night sky in a culturally Buddhist register, and aligns the print with the broader Meiji-era engagement between Japanese pictorial tradition and the new sciences. The Library of Congress impression preserves the saturated dark inks and unusually large spiral form that distinguish this variant from its companion.